Title: View-Centric Performance Optimization for Database-Backed Web Applications

Speaker: Junwen Yang (University of Chicago)

Time: 14:00pm, Sept 23th, 2019 

Venue: Seminar Room (334), Level 3, Building 5, Institute of Software, CAS 

Abstract: Web developers face the stringent task of designing informative web pages while keeping the page-load time low. This task has become increasingly challenging as most web contents are now generated by processing ever-growing amount of user data stored in back-end databases. It is difficult for developers to understand the cost of generating every web-page element, not to mention explore and pick the web design with the best trade-off between performance and functionality. In this paper, we present Panorama, a view-centric and database-aware development environment for web developers. Using database-aware program analysis and novel IDE design, Panorama provides developers with intuitive information about the cost and the performance-enhancing opportunities behind every HTML element, as well as suggesting various global code refactorings that enable developers to easily explore a wide spectrum of performance and functionality trade-offs. 

Biography: Junwen Yang is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in system group at the department of computer science, the University of Chicago. She is working with Prof. Shan Lu on the performance and the scalability problems of data processing and data analytics systems. Her past research has led to three first-author papers published on the 41th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in 2019, which won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, 40th ICSE in 2018, which raised much attention in open-source community and was featured on Morning Paper blog, RubyWeekly and Hacker News, and 26th Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) in 2018, which automatically identified more than 1000 performance / scalability problems in latest versions of popular open-source web applications, and a co-authored paper on the 26th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) 2017.